[I went to the city, came back with Technicolor] by Jennifer Moore | Poetry

Poetry – Issue 10 | September 2010

[I went to the city, came back with Technicolor]

by Jennifer Moore

I went to the city, came back with Technicolor. I came back
with radio waves and ticket stubs. Lots of ballpoint pens, nothing transient.

Never wanting all that neon, I dismantled the structure, uncoiled
the blueprints, turned downtown’s steel wool into quilting bees

and horse apples. Doesn’t each history contain another, possible body?
The husk that could have happened.

Here, we bury our food to keep it cool. We husk our own corn, just think night
and it crops up. Here, repetition is the opposite of excursion.

Everywhere, repetition is the opposite of excursion. Why is it
all I have are pencils when I want to leave something permanent? Or is what I want

to leave anywhere for good, never come back—
I was in the middle of a sentence about evening. Even landscape

disintegrates. Do people still take lovers? Who says lovers anymore?
What’s seductive is the absorption of one image into another: taillights. Box-

cars. Apples in all of my needles’ eyes. A bad fever, this drive for departure—
when I come back I will come back as someone’s sister,

a little unkempt, lost in a field of corkscrews. Wanting camaraderie,
I will bring a strawberry buckle. Wanting something to unbutton, I will bring

eyeliner, tickets to tonight’s game. I will come back, having forgotten
I had ever left. Had ever torn the husk to its quick.

Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, but has lived in Colorado, California, Utah and Pennsylvania. She currently spends her time in Chicago, Illinois, where she is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has work published or forthcoming in 14 Hills, Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southampton Review and elsewhere.

Read our current issue, Issue 10 | September 2010:

Literary Bohemian

Poetry – Issue 10 | September 2010